Behind the De La Warr gallery in Bexhill lie some neat, symmetrical gardens leading down to the sea. It is unexpectedly formal and gorgeous, like an English version of Last Year in Marienbad. Along with Rye, Battle and Ticehurst, Bexhill makes up the throbbing epicentre of Rother, the district crowned by this week's census data as having the lowest male-to-female ratio in England and Wales.

"Lowest mental female ratio? I can't believe that," said a man named Chris, in the De La Warr carpark. "MALE TO FEMALE." "Well," he said mischievously, "that would explain why we keep being chased around." Ruminating for a second on the statistics, he added: "I came in on the bus this morning. There must have been 20 people on it, and I was the only man."

Mr and Mrs Bossom will have been married 45 years in December, and have always lived in Bexhill. They say the gender imbalance isn't pronounced among young people. It's more because, as Mrs Bossom says, "at my age, there seem to be more women losing their husbands."

"It's just because it's Costa Del Geriatrica," Mr Bossom chips in helpfully. If there's one thing we all know about women and men, it's that women live longer, or at least, as doctors have it, we take longer to die.

The census data demonstrates that among the Rother under-fours, there is a straight 50:50 split, and right up until the residents are 64, the preponderance of women is only 51% to 49%. Then the lead opens to 57:43 among the over-65s, rising to 72:28 among the over-90s.

I asked Sally Hood and Sarah Lockwood what this did to one's dating prospects when you're 65-plus; Hood said phlegmatically: "I wouldn't know because I really haven't gone out looking. I'm married." Mildly, Lockwood noted: "But there are plenty of places. If you were looking, you'd know where to go." The younger generation is oblivious to this: Robert Nutter, who's 21, said: "Yes, there's a red light district, but all the red lights are funeral lights. In Brighton, you'd struggle to find anybody over 40, here, you'd struggle to find anybody under 40. It's extremely sleepy. Compared to Eastbourne, it's another world."

Chris with the comic mishearing meets his friends – there are normally eight of them, today only four – every week in Bexhill, and this informal social club is a response to their sense that, if you're a man in Rother who doesn't play bowls, there's very little organised socialising aimed at you. His friend Ken says: "I stopped going to the theatre appreciation society, because they were all women. I didn't have anyone to talk to."

But what the non-Rother resident might find surprising is not that women dominate the theatre appreciation clubs; rather, how much sheer socialising there is, wherever you look – Dilys Mayor, who works in Glass and High Class Junk down the road in Rye, said: "If you don't want to join in, people leave you alone, but if you do, there's so much to do. There's always a club to go to or something going on."

I wonder whether this reflects the high proportion of women; even though naturally I am opposed to essentialist readings of gender characteristics, if I were to generalise, then I would say that women are friendlier and better at making social arrangements. Mayor disagrees: "I don't think it's about women, I think it's a generational thing." And Jilly Clarke, who runs an antique jewellery shop, also in Rye, says: "You could say that the shops are more women's than men's, but probably more women than men shop anyway. I do notice there are more women when I'm walking around, but socially I don't notice, no."

The main thing that strikes me about Rother is the sense of it being exquisitely well-tended – not in that Cotswolds way, where you can just smell money from behind high hedges, but rather, in its public spaces. 25-year-old Nathalie, who works in adult social care, remarked on the safety of Bexhill: "I'd walk home alone at 11 at night. I would never have done that in St Leonards."

There is an alarming lack of litter or defacement of any sort, to the degree that, despite there being plenty of people around, it felt initially like a ghost town. There just isn't enough mess to suggest habitation. While it's true that the inhabitants are pretty sparse (178 people per square kilometre – in my home borough there are 11,305), I think I agree with Dilys. It's not the women who make it this way, it's the generation.

Retirement these days is no longer simply a case of being presented with a carriage clock on your 65th birthday, then heading off to play golf for the next 30 years. With warmth and intelligence, the authors lead you step-by-step through the issues you will face as you approach retirement.